Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

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Nic Pizzolatto

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 18, 1975

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

Nic Pizzolatto

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

Nic Pizzolatto

TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.

Nic Pizzolatto

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.

Nic Pizzolatto

If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'

Nic Pizzolatto

I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.

Nic Pizzolatto

When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.

Nic Pizzolatto

The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy.

Nic Pizzolatto

I made 'True Detective' like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.

Nic Pizzolatto

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

Nic Pizzolatto

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

Nic Pizzolatto

It's better to not have a reputation than a bad one.

Nic Pizzolatto

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.

Nic Pizzolatto

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

Nic Pizzolatto

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Nic Pizzolatto

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

Nic Pizzolatto

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

Nic Pizzolatto

I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.

Nic Pizzolatto

I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Nic Pizzolatto

You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.

Nic Pizzolatto